Re: “Keep close eye on sewage plans,” editorial, Aug. 20.
The editorial ignores evidence and obscures the reality of a Capital Regional District sewage plan gone seriously off the rails. The editorial also downplays the importance of the neighbourhoods that rallied (and won) against the CRD’s secret decision to plunk an unsafe sewage sludge plant in their community.
Indeed, that sketchy CRD decision has resulted in many more neighbourhoods now being aroused and preparing for the prospect of more of the CRD’s equally bad decisions.
Blindly accepting statements that our current marine-based sewage treatment system is high-risk meant that the CRD secretly bought Viewfield and told the neighbours that they should be willing to be collateral victims.
However, many scientists agree that we have a low-risk marine-based sewage treatment system, so there is no need for the CRD’s plan to imperil neighbourhoods with high-risk sewage treatment plant, sludge plant and long effluent pipelines. Especially when the CRD also refuses to consider possible Agricultural Land Reserve and Department of National Defence locations, or alternate systems, as Coun. Vic Derman is proposing.
Derman’s motion advocating an examination of distributed sewage plants is a sincere initiative that would also reduce the inequity of saddling one neighbourhood with a high-risk sewage-sludge plant complex, another with high-risk sludge pipelines, while letting the rest of the CRD off the hook.
The CRD needs to revisit Derman’s motion, or look at many more months of increasingly agitated, angry neighbourhoods.
John Newcomb
Saanich
